ON SCIENCE AND ART 141 



dwell strongly upon the point, and I beg you to believe 

 that the words I have just now read were by no means 

 intended by me as a sop to the Cerberus 3 of culture. 

 I have not been in the habit of offering sops to any 

 kind of Cerberus; but it was an expression of profound 

 conviction on my own part a conviction forced upon 

 me not only by my mental constitution, but by the 

 lessons of what is now becoming a somewhat long ex- 

 perience of varied conditions of life. 



I am not about to trouble you with my autobiog- 

 raphy; the omens are hardly favourable, at present, for 

 work of that kind. But I should like if I may do so 

 without appearing, what I earnestly desire not to be, 

 egotistical I should like to make it clear to you, that 

 such notions as these, which are sometimes attributed to 

 me, are, as I have said, inconsistent with my mental 

 constitution, and still more inconsistent with the up- 

 shot of the teaching of my experience. For I can cer- 

 tainly claim for myself that sort of mental temperament 

 which can say that nothing human comes amiss to it. 

 I have never yet met with any branch of human knowl- 

 edge which I have found unattractive 4 which it would 

 not have been pleasant to me to follow, so far as I 

 could go; and I have yet to meet with any form of art 

 in which it has not been possible for me to take as 

 acute a pleasure as, I believe, it is possible for men to 

 take. 



And with respect to the circumstances of life, it so 

 happens that it has been my fate to know many lands 

 and many climates, and to be familiar, by personal ex- 



3 In his lines Of Poetry Jonathan Swift wrote of the king's 

 ministers when they descended to Hades: 



"To Cerberus they give a sop, 

 His triple-barking mouth to stop." 



4 An allusion to Terence's celebrated line, humani nihil a me 

 alienum puto, "I consider nothing human foreign to me." 



